Gongol.com Archives: September 2025
September 2, 2025
What Dick Portillo did with his buyout cash
The guy might be even better at making investment decisions than at making sausages. And he was really good at the sausages.
A nuclear power plant in Michigan with an 800-megawatt capacity is about to be restarted, making it the first in the country to be officially restarted. 800 megawatts is a big chunk of electricity: The Lower 48 States have been oscillating between about 400,000 and 600,000 megawatt-hours for the past week, about 100,000 of which have come from nuclear plants. The Michigan restart probably won't be the last, either: The Duane Arnold plant near Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is also in line for a restart. ■ The Palisades plant has a number of credible detractors, and reasonable objections should be faithfully reviewed. But we also need to account for the knowledge that nuclear power is a decidedly stable source of carbon-free electricity, and if we're going to get ahead of the consequences of generations of fossil-fuel use, then we need to electrify even more of the economy and do it without emitting more carbon. That means renewables and nuclear power, hand-in-hand. ■ There's a lot of optimistic talk about small modular reactors -- simplified, scaled-down nuclear plants -- including at the site where the Michigan plant is being rebooted. They're talking about installing twin 300-megawatt units there, for another 600 megawatts total. As long as the power isn't entirely sucked up by new demand from data centers (a very real issue), then the restart and expansion ought to be a net social positive.
Mick Ryan, Australian retired-general-turned-war-theorist, has observed that the latest giant military parade through Beijing was mainly devoid of surprises, though Ryan does note that China's capacity for developing and manufacturing new military hardware seems to have expanded quite a bit. The whole affair was a spectacle for the purpose of spectacle, featuring front-row seats for Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin. ■ In the modern era, big military parades like this are generally put on for chumps: A victory parade is one thing, but a parade to show off big guns and big missiles is really just a way to burn through a whole lot of cash in return for (usually) mandatory applause. That doesn't mean China's arsenal isn't potentially impressive, nor that the US should ignore the consequences of our own hostile behavior towards nations that ought to be easy friends of ours. (This is, for instance, a really stupid time to be cutting off funding for Radio Free Asia and other levers of public influence abroad.) ■ But a parade doesn't reveal anything about whether a country has organized its military in the right way to win conflicts. The top-down orientation of China's People's Liberation Army is a strategic deadweight, especially compared with the way that the United States has historically encouraged and rewarded initiative at lower levels of leadership. ■ The other thing masked by the mere spectacle and showmanship of a parade is the thoroughly unstable superstructure of China's military. The People's Liberation Army isn't sworn to protect the country; it's there to preserve, protect, and defend the Communist Party. There's no way to make that a stable platform in perpetuity. ■ That doesn't mean it can't stick around for a long time (it obviously already has), but we should never overlook the role of morale in successful warfare. And to fight for the preservation of a self-serving party is a different motive than to fight for one's country. No parade can truly reveal the effects of that kind of moral decay.
